Posts Tagged Social Learning

I’m currently facilitating a Social and Collaborative Learning Essentials(SCLE) course. This course is offered through the Australian Institute of Training and Development. It runs in a virtual environment over eight weeks. This week I’ve refreshed the curated content used in the course.

One person whose work I always check on when I’m refreshing this course is Julian Stodd*. I find Julian Stodd’s research, thinking and practice around Social Leadership both insightful and practical. I also appreciate his philosophy that all his work is imperfect and is continually evolving.

In a recent series of Training Journal podcast interviews Julian spoke about power, trust and the social age. I added Part 2 to the SCLE resources. I was especially interested in Julian’s research on high value communities (of practice) in the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. Amongst his findings are that:

their most valuable communities are informal ones, not ones ‘given to them’ by the organisation

top communities are ones they were invited into – someone reached out to them to join the conversation

the primary focus of these communities are ‘conversations of improvement”

most important thing is ‘choreography of engagement’, the way people are welcomed into the community

The group studied use 17 different technologies to interact on a daily basis, of which 16 are not controlled by the NHS – they are ‘shadow IT.’ If organisations want to leverage the power of social learning they need to move beyond an environment of control. This includes controlling the technologies being used to enable conversation and community.

If you do an internet search on the term ‘shadow IT’ you will find a lot of articles talking about how the IT department can regain control of the tools and platforms being used. This is not especially useful to people in the organisation who are turning to tools that help them to get the job done, improve productivity and cut through red tape.

My curiosity was recently piqued by a white paper from Cognizant on 21 Jobs of the Future. These are jobs that are envisaged to be required within the next 10 years. One of these is ‘Bring Your Own IT Facilitator.’ The purpose of this role is to ‘fuse shadow-IT operations with digital workplace strategy.’ In describing this role Cognizant commented:

“We see the growth of shadow-IT as an immense opportunity for IT to collaborate with business units and individuals who have mastered the art of working without IT.”

While acknowledging the valid concerns that shadow-IT raises (just Google it) I find this a much more positive and useful perspective. Shadow IT is here to stay. People are finding value in using all sorts of consumer tools and platforms, as evidenced in the social learning sphere by Julian’s research. If we are going to support people to engage in high value conversations let’s shine a light in the shadows (but not too brightly lest we kill the conversation) and embrace shadow-IT.

* Confession – I have a social learning crush on Julian Stodd. Just look at the language he uses to talk about social interaction – ‘choreography of engagement’ is a beautiful phrase.

Earlier this year I facilitated the Social and Collaborative Learning Essentials course for the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) for the first time. This is an eight week online course that helps participants get more intentional with social learning. The course is conducted using social learning approaches. Participants engage with content, each other and the facilitator (me!) in a number of online platforms and a series of webinars.

It was the first time I had facilitated the course, which was designed and curated by Patrick Phillips in 2017. As I start to prepare for the next session to kick off on 25 September, I’m reviewing lessons learned from last time.

The course includes an action learning project which is the critical to support participants to apply their learning. This project asks participants to develop or update the social learning strategy for their organisation. They can do this as a standalone strategy, or integrated in their broader organisational learning strategy.

Several participants were active in the course online platforms (Curatr and Slack) early in the program, discussing the challenges and opportunities that they felt social learning may help address. It was these participants who went on to create the most comprehensive and well-considered strategies. Their ideas and approaches formed progressively throughout the course and they used each other and me as a sounding board. I built on this by adjusting the fortnightly webinars to be hosted discussions rather than content delivery sessions.

I was surprised by how well the participants’ strategies came together in the final two weeks as they synthesised the entire course content, their discussions and insights into their own organisational context. Each presented their strategy in a different format and style, and emphasised approaches and techniques that suited their context. I’m confident that the participants who actually presented their strategy in the final course webinar got the most value out of the course.

The next time I facilitate the course I shall present a summary of some of the strategies developed by previous participants in the introductory webinar (with permission of course). My intent is to give people a sense of what is possible and motivate them to working on their action learning project. I shall also adjust some of the discussion questions in the initial modules to help participants clarify the organisational issues or opportunities that they would like to apply social learning to address.

One aspect I’ll give more thought to in the coming week is how trust built among the participants who were more active. I’d like to identify what factors or dynamics helped to build trust, and consider what I can do to nurture this among the next course cohort.

You do not have to be an AITD member to complete the course. Register here for the next course.

One of my goals in 2018 is to find a new town to live in as I travel around the east coast of Australia. I’ll be covering a lot of territory with my daughter, driving from place to place and staying in Airbnb accomodation for eleven months. Our plan is to stay in most places one week – occasionally a little less, and occasionally a little more. I’ve been thinking about how we can learn about life in the towns we visit and figure out what it might be like living there. One of the most important ways we can do this is to talk to local people and create the space for them to tell us their stories about their life in the town.

Thinking about how to elicit people’s stories reminded me of a day I spent with Laura Overton of Towards Maturity in early November 2017. She was visiting Sydney, and I introduced her to two Learning and Development colleagues that I had worked with previously. During our conversations with these two people I learned new things about them as a result of the way Laura opened up the space for them to tell their story. She was genuinely curious and had no agenda other than to listen and find out how they thought and worked, and what influenced them. I was so impressed that I made a video about this experience, and am sharing it on my Working Out Loud page for the first time today.

Are you interested in using social / collaborative learning strategies to create impactful, engaging, high-quality learning experiences? Join me in Sydney on 13 March 2017 to hone your skills designing and implementing social learning solutions.

Outcomes

In March I’m facilitating a program that is focussed on using social / collaborative approaches as part of a learning solution to meet a business need. As a result of participating in this program you’ll be able to do the following:

Determine how social learning can help address your specific business problem / opportunity

Design or redesign a learning solution to effectively incorporate social learning

Select social learning activities and enabling tools to use in your solution

Develop a strategy to implement your social learning solution

How This Program Works

This is a program about social / collaborative learning. As such it is a social learning experience. There are three elements to this program:

Pre-workshop – You can familiarise yourself with the program by viewing a small set of online resources. It is essential to select an appropriate workplace project to work on during the workshop – guidance is provided in a pre-workshop introduction to assist with this selection. Participants are also invited to join a private online discussion forum in LinkedIn.

Workshop – This is a highly participative and collaborative event, focused around a number of individual and group activities. Participants will be able to work on the design of a social learning solution for your workplace project. You should bring your smartphone, tablet or laptop as we will be making good use of them to access web resources and use online tools. We will use a shared Google document for collaborative note-taking, and you are invited to use the LinkedIn group as a backchannel.

Post-workshop – The LinkedIn group will remain active for at least four weeks after the workshop. You are encouraged to continue to work on your social learning solution, and you may seek feedback on your solution via the group. You also have the opportunity to participate in the collaborative development of a social learning resource. Additional resources will be posted and you can continue the conversation with the group online.

How to Enrol

The workshop is being run as a pre-conference event at the 9th Annual Blended Learning Conference. For more information on the workshop, about me as your facilitator, and how to register download the brochure.

Follow on Twitter

Use the hashtag #blc to follow the Blended Learning Conference backchannel.

Add the hashtag #soclrn to follow the public backchannel for the workshop.

I’ve participated in the mentoring program run by the Australian Institute of Training and Development for the past two years – first as a mentee, then a mentor. Last night was the end of program celebration event in Sydney, which Neil Von Heupt facilitated. Neil ran a ‘speed’ mentoring activity. Each mentee had a two minute conversation with each mentor to discuss their response to the three questions on the flipchart below.

The mentors were not forewarned of this activity, so our responses were very ‘top of mind.’ With the possible exception of the first question, my responses would be unsurprising to anyone who had worked with me in the past two years.

Most important aspect of my work

My gut reply to this when asked was ‘conversations.’ It’s not what I expected, and if I’d had more time to think about my response I may have crafted a different response. However, I think it’s true and is at the heart of much of my professional practice and development. I find it vital to talk with others to help me reflect, solve problems, ideate, explore, strategise and plan. As an Learning and Development leader, having a performance consulting conversations with people who ask for a ‘program’ or ‘course’ helps in identifying underlying causes of performance gaps and appropriate solutions (which may not require training). Conversation is also at the heart of social learning.

I’d like to acknowledge the influence of Harold Jarche in shaping my awareness of the power of conversation in learning – fittingly, through two very memorable conversations we have had at Edutech conference in 2015 and on a Skype call earlier this year.

In conversation with Simon Terry at Edutech 2015 – photo taken by Harold Jarche

Favourite tool for L&D

As a personal and professional development tool, it’s definitely Twitter for me. It’s turned my learning on it’s head since I started actively using it three years ago by enabling me to access people to engage with in a mutually beneficial interchange of sharing resources, ideas and experiences. It’s one place where I have useful conversations. Need more convincing? Read what others have to say about Twitter as a development tool.

Hot career tip

Make time for reflection using whatever method suits you. It’s vital to make sense of your experience, figure out what’s working and what you’d like to improve, and to inform your future actions. I do a daily reflection in Evernote using a list of prompter questions on this linked list. I write a dot point answer to those that seem relevant. At the end of the week I then use the weekly reflection questions in my list to draw out key themes. When I have the capacity I also blog about my work.

Which leads me to my second hot career tip – Work Out Loud. In essence this is what I do on my blog. Make your work and working processes visible to others – both when it’s a work in progress and when it’s complete. Search on social media platforms or an internet search tool (#WOL #showyourwork and #WOLWeek) for a wide range of examples of how you can make your work visible. Follow Jane Bozarth who provides practical guidance and examples to help you get started simply and quickly.

To maximise the career benefits of making your work visible, adopt the expanded Working Out Loud practice using the Working Out Loud Circle Guides. Adopting Working Out Loud has radically altered my professional development, enabled me to build a contribution-based network, and created many opportunities.

Your Turn

How would you respond to these three questions? Post a reply below or share your response on Twitter with #LNDcareertips

I attended the Association for Talent Development International Conference and Exposition (ATDICE) in Denver 23– 25 May 2016. On the day after the conference I made a short video to share key insights I gained from some of the sessions I attended. Video is below, followed by (slightly polished-up) transcript.

Personal Leadership

My first insights I relate to aspects of personal leadership. I attended a session called Leading with Impact and Influence by Amy Franko from Impact Instruction. Amy spoke about leading from the inside out, and not being knocked about by external circumstances, or letting them dictate how you show up. She spoke about creating your own leadership path to create a ripple effect on others in order to have impact, influence, and provide inspiration. She shared research from the Centre for Creative Leadership that identified key future leadership skills:

Thought Leadership

Another session I’ve got a lot out of for myself was on Stepping Into Thought leadership. The session was presented by two very dynamic people – Alexia Vernon and Halelly Azulay. Before they went into different thought leadership they talked about what thought leadership is. They suggested that you don’t need to carve out a completely original area of thinking or an original idea; rather it’s about bringing your original voice and perspective to the topic to articulate what you want to say about it. They provided questions to help you uncover your focus area of thought leadership. They also stressed the role of building strong networks to help build thought leadership.

Then they went through a stack of different though leadership activities in the areas of:

Brave Leadership

Sticking with the theme of leadership, there is no way I couldn’t mention the amazing keynote by Brene Brown. Many people will have seen her TEDTalk on vulnerability. She was a fabulous speaker, very authentic, and spoke to her topic really well. It’s a topic that can be quite raw and I had a feeling she was reaching out directly to my heart and talking about topics relevant to my personal life around thing such as vulnerability and trust, and also that she was speaking to my head in organisational context around bringing trust into the workplace. She suggested that leaders have to make a choice as between comfort and courage. It takes courage to do the essential work of being a leader – which is to go to places that others may not want to go to, places around emotion and behaviour. She spoke about the four pillars of courage:

Vulnerability

clarity of values

trust

rising skills, which is about how to get back up after a fall.

She really made me want to embrace life, to live a bigger life and to be the very best leader that I possibly can. I’m definitely a Brene Brown fan girl now.

Science of Learning

Paul Zak , Chief Research Officer at Olfactor, talked about trust as the basis for effective culture. He shared interesting research which uses oxytocin as a signalling mechanism for trust.

Sebastian Bailey is a psychologist with a PhD in learning transfer. He’s used his research to develop a model for supporting learning with bite-size methodology. He has founded Mind Gym.

Patti Shank PhD and is president of Learning Peak challenged the use of the term ‘neuro-‘ anything. When someone claims that a product or approach is backed by neuroscience she suggested that you need to be wary as we haven’t learnt much about learning from neuroscience. However we have learned a lot from cognitive science and we should be paying bit more attention to that and applying it.

Will Thalheimer is a PhD, consultant and research translator. He spoke about ways of improving smile sheets, which I’m sure anyone working in an organisational training context could benefit from looking at.

Benchmarking

The next area I was really interested in here was benchmarking and Data. I had a great conversation with Laura Overton of Towards Maturity who specialise in benchmarking and research on organisational learning. We discussed their benchmarking tool which is open at the moment. I strongly encourage workplace learning practitioners to complete the benchmark. I’ve recently done that and it’s giving me some good data to look at where my organisation sits compared to the benchmark in a range of elements of learning strategy and practices, and helped me to start identifying areas for improvement. Here’s a link to the benchmark .

Laura also presented with Peter Casebow from Good Practice about improving how managers learn using an evidence-based approach. The Towards Maturity data shows that only 30% of learning professionals understand how their people learn. Good Practice has done research with 500 managers on how they deal with unfamiliar challenges. It turns out that access trumps the perceived effectiveness of method for finding answers and solutions. People will use the easiest way to access information, even if they know they may not be using the best quality information. Lack of access and lack of relevance of content were highlighted as barriers to people using their intranet to help solve problems.

Practical Uses of Social Media for Formal Learning

The final session I wanted to mention here is from the super-energetic Dan Steer who had us cheering along at the right times. It was on practical uses of social media in formal training. His objective was to ensure that everybody left with something practical that they could put into action immediately to improve the formal training – and he delivered. He provided some basic principles around only doing in the room what need to do, and thinking about using social media tools to do other things that don’t need to be done in the room. He also suggested you need to think about the type of activity you are doing, the objectives of the activity and identify the best motivating and most useful tool.

One tool I learned about that session which I will definitely be looking to use is Ginkgo, which is a collaborative note-taking tool. What is awesome is that you can download the collaborative notes into a MS Word format and make that available as a readily accessible recap afterwards.

The other thing I wanted to do is to thank ATD. 10,000 people, huge conference venue, amazing organisation. ATD did a great job at every single aspect of the organisation, and as a speaker I really appreciated the opportunity to be here and share a case study. I don’t know that I’ll be back every year it is a long trip from Australia but I’m certainly planning on being back in two years . I will be blogging and sharing more of my notes from sessions over the next couple of weeks so lookout on my blog for more insights

My team in Supply Chain at Coca-Cola Amatil was a finalist in the new award category of ‘Best Use of Social/Collaborative Learning. I was also a finalist in the ‘Dr Alastair Rylatt Award for Learning and Development Professional of the Year.’ I had prepared acceptance speeches as I wanted to take the opportunity to acknowledge some of the people and organisations who had contributed to both of these achievements. I also wanted to share an idea about professional development for Learning and Development (L&D) practitioners. Unfortunately I did not get to use either of these speeches. So I’ve decided to use my blog to express my appreciation and share this idea.

Best Use of Social/Collaborative Learning

Coca-Cola Amatil in partnership with Activate Learning Solutions were Highly Commended in the inaugural award in this category for our work on the Supply Chain Systems Certificaton Program. (I shall blog soon about this program.)

I lead the Supply Chain Technical Academy at Coca-Cola Amatil. The Academy has had the privilege of working with others across Supply Chain to develop and implement a more open, collaborative approach to learning which seeks to integrate learning with work.

Thank you to the Supply Chain leaders who have been willing to adopt a modern approach to learning in our business, especially to Jeff Maguire, Head of People & Productivity, and David Grant, the Supply Chain Director. Thank you for supporting innovation in learning.

Thank you also to the AITD for introducing this award category. It symbolises the progressive work you’ve undertaken in the past 12-18 months to remain relevant as a professional association and reflect the changing nature of L&D. I appreciate the validation that CCA Supply Chain is on the right track with our social and collaborative learning initiatives.

It takes a lot of collaboration to create and sustain such initiatives. Thank you to Justine Jardine and Karlo Briski from our Technical Academy team – both have been creative, bold and resilient in developing and facilitating the program. Thank you also to the Community of Practice members, who were represented at the awards by Matt Hay, David Barker and Sreeni Barmalli. They have been active program participants and, as part of their daily operational roles, have taken a lead in Communities of Practice and supporting others to engage in the certification program.

I’d also like to acknowledge the fabulous support of Helen Blunden from Activate Learning Solutions. Her guidance was critical in launching our communities of practice, and developing the networking and social learning skills of participants with the Work, Connect and Learn program. She is a worthy co-recipient of this award.

The Dr Alastair Rylatt Award for Learning and Development Professional of the Year

This award is presented to an individual who has made a significant contribution to learning and development in the past 18 months. Congratulations to Dr Denise Meyerson, Director of Management Consultancy International, for being the 2015 award recipient.

Austin Kleon has written a wonderful little book called ‘Show Your Work.’ The first chapter is titled ‘You Don’t Have To Be Genius’ and it opens with the words ‘Find A Scenius.’ It’s a term that Kleon has picked up from Brian Eno who defines it as follows: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

My selection as a finalist is largely due to my use of working out loud to find a Scenius, which is a funkier term for what is commonly called a Personal Learning Network. If you are not familiar with the term ‘Personal Learning Network’ I suggest you Google it, consider the state of your own network, and how you can build it. Being part of a network or scenius is a key factor in accelerating your professional development and making a contribution.

To quote from Austin Kleon:

“Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but what you have to contribute – the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start.”

Thank you to the people around the world who are part of my scenius. It is all of you who have made it possible for me to transform my professional development, to learn from and alongside you, to make a contribution and as a result to create new possibilities. The specific people I am about to mention are representative of those in my scenius who collectively enable me to develop and contribute, but ths is well short of an exhaustive list. They include thought leaders from across the world such as Jane Hart in the UK, Charles Jennings and Jane Bozarth in the US, Harold Jarche in Canada and Simon Terry in Melbourne. There are also other L&D practitioners who work out loud, generously talking about their work practices, challenges and ideas about where L&D is headed – people such as Ryan Tracey in Sydney, Sunder Ramachandran in India, and Shannon Tipton in the US.

Thank you to the people and organisations who are connectors, creating opportunity for L&D professionals to engage in conversation, and share experience and practices – such as Third Place founded by Helen Blunden, the Ozlearn community facilitated by Con Sotidis and, of course, the AITD.

Closer to my day-to-day work are my colleagues at Coca-Cola Amatil, represented at the awards night by Justine Jardine and Karlo Briski. It’s a joy to learn and figure out what works alongside you. I extend this sentiment to my ex-colleague and peer-mentor, Lynette Curtis who travelled from Melbourne to join the celebrations.

Finally, to my manager of the past four years, Jeff Maguire, thank you for your unwavering trust and support, and the autonomy and flexibility you have granted me to create and embed the Academy and Capability Community in Supply Chain. Thank you also to seeing the value in sharing stories of how we work outside of our organisational boundaries and granting me the freedom to work out loud.

If you take away one thing from my selection as a finalist for this award, it’s to build your network – create your Scenius in order to unlock your Genius.

In September I delivered a webinar on the Work Connect and Learn (WCL) program for the 702010 Forum. Helen Blunden, who developed and facilitated the first program delivery, co-presented. While the webinar recording is only available to 702010 Forum members, the presentation content was largely drawn from posts we had each made as part of the evolving Community of Practice case study hosted on my blog. There were a lot of questions raised during the webinar which we weren’t able to respond to so I have posted responses below.

Q: How long has the program been up and running? How many employees are currently in this program

We have run the program twice – in February / March 2015, and April / May 2015. Since then we have been supporting application of the skills and behaviours covered in the program through ongoing Communities of Practice.

250 people participated across the two programs – 200 in the first and 50 in the second. In hindsight, the first group was too big and diverse for us to effectively support and properly engage everyone as a ‘community’ in the program. Note that it was the diversity and different entry level of skill with online tools rather than the group size that created the biggest challenges for keeping all participants fully engaged in the program. The second group had a clearer common practice / domain area and similar entry level skills. We were able to track and enable participation more effectively with this group.

Q: What program did you utilise to facilitate the webinars, and did you record them for individuals to view at a later date? Also, were the webinars interactive, or more of a presentation?

We ran the webinars using Lync (now called Skype for Business). We recorded webinars, put them (unlisted) on YouTube and posted links to recordings in SharePoint discussion forums. This was particularly helpful in a shift environment to people whose work shifts precluded attending scheduled sessions. The webinars were a mix of presentation and interaction. Lync/Skype for Business includes chat, polls and whiteboards. Some webinar activities were conducted using MS OneNote (wiki functionality). We also used teleconference during the webinars so we could have verbal discussions without intranet bandwidth challenges. We deliberately used our day to day corporate tools.

Q: From a planning perspective- how long did it take to build the WCL

The analysis / performance consulting phase occurred in November 2014, design in December 2015, and development of both the program and the online community spaces was complete in early February 2015. Taking into account the Christmas break, this amounted to one month for analysis and approximately two months for design and development.

Q: What were the challenges in creating the shift to this type of learning?

Some of our people don’t spend a lot of time at a computer or use mobile devices as they work. In this case it’s difficult to establish convenient habits and ways of engaging in online knowledge sharing and collaboration. Even where people have good access to technology, for many using SharePoint and mobile tools for learning were quite new. However, through the program people realised that they have collaborative tools at their fingertips which they can use in their work practices.

The other challenge is to help people develop habits to check and use the forums, think to ask a question or share what they are doing. In the second version of the program we put a lot more emphasis on activities to help people form habits.

Q: Do the maintenance personnel have their own computers at work, do they share computers, etc? What is the access to the technology needed?

See the question above. Our maintenance personnel will be moving to mobile mobile devices in 2016 as part of introducing a mobility app for our core maintenance management system. To support this initiative we will provide training/hand-holding on use of the mobile devices, and will also run a tailored version Work Connect and Learn for this group.

Q: What role, if any, did managers play in helping to create and/or facilitate this culture of learning?

WCL has now been delivered to two groups. For the first group, our Maintenance and Engineering Community, managers participated alongside team members. Their participation was important to role model behaviours and encourage others to engage in collaborative learning and working. For the second group, our Systems Community, managers were not participants.

Because this style of learning and working is different to previous approaches we have used, we developed a change management plan which started with engaging the managers as a first step. We held teleconference discussions with them prior to commencing each of the programs so they were aware of the aims and what they could do to support their team members to get the most out of the program. We provided them posters and talking points so they could introduce the program to their teams and discuss their commitment to it before launch.

We have also followed up with managers to keep them abreast of what is happening in the Communities of Practice on an ongoing basis and to specifically seek support at times (e.g. ‘Did you see this post from your team member – it’s great – you might want to leave a comment to support them.’)

Q: What about keeping the community going after the program, community management/facilitation – who is taking the lead on that?

The National Engineering and Maintenance Managers facilitate this community with support from the Academy. We ran a coaching program on community facilitation for these people.

The Systems community is facilitated by Academy team members in conjunction with 1 or more Super Users from within the business. The closer level of involvement of the Academy is due to the tight integration of the Community of Practice with our internal systems certification program.

Q How much intervention is required to keep it going – to have it self managing?

We are not yet at the point where any of our communities are ‘self-managing’. We’re considering creating a ‘Community and Knowledge Manager’ role to increase focus on building effective Communities of Practice.

Q: What was the name of the gamification that you used?

We didn’t have a gamification platform to use and the native SharePoint community gamification didn’t suit our purpose. So we kept the game simple and tracked it manually.

Q: Have people used video to show their work practices and share them across the geographic areas?

In our Systems community some people have made screencasts. In our maintenance community short videos are sometimes posted to illustrate equipment problems and fixes. Our maintenance people have sometimes used FaceTime to show each other what is happening on a production line to help with troubleshooting.

Q: Is the shared learning moderated to ensure consistency and quality?

Consistency and quality comes from generating an open sharing, learning and working environment within the community. There is no screening or review of discussion forum or newsfeed posts before they are ‘publicly’ viewable. The intent is to surface and clarify misinformation or misunderstanding and utilise the expertise available in the community to provide accurate information or better ways of doing things – or to co-create these.

There is an element of moderation on the ‘Knowledge Bites’ which are user-generated ‘how to guide’s and similar content. However the moderation is undertaken in public view. A traffic light system is used to highlight content in development, under expert review and where expert review has been completed.

Q: What has been the feedback from the participants?

I am preparing a blog post to summarise program evaluation. In the meantime, high level summary of what participants found useful and suggested improving after the first delivery of WCL is below. Overall the program was well received by those who had good daily access to the tools needed to participate.

Useful

Improvements

Tools & how to use them

Awareness of new ways of working, connecting & learning

Connecting to others

Social networking

Knowledge sharing

Access to information

Target audience was too wide

Access to tools by tradespeople

More interaction in webinars

Support resources / job aids

Follow on support for continued learning

Technical problems with early webinars

Q: Can you enlighten us on what the specific performance outcomes were as these are quite hard to define.

Refer to this post for more detail on the evaluation approach and performance outcomes / metrics used for the program and communities of practice.

Q: You mentioned measurement before, during and after. How long after did you measure impact and what did you learn?

Refer to this blog post for an overview of the evaluation approach. I will soon add a post on evaluation immediately after the WCL program. Refer to this post for a medium term view of how our communities of practice are progressing.

Q: I’m interested to know if CCA has seen a shift in engagement and performance as a result of these initiatives?

Shifting a learning culture and embedding knowledge sharing into work practices takes time. We have seen specific examples of improvements in work practices and processes, although could not yet make a link between the program / communities of practice and overall business unit performance or engagement. The results have been encouraging enough that our management team is supportive of continuing with our social learning initiatives.

Q: How would you scale this type of program to other areas in the business?

One way is to develop a self-directed curated version of the program, as described in response to the question above.

A ‘public version’ of the guided social learning program could also be run that supports the development of skills for collaborative working and learning in the network era without activities being linked to a specific community of practice.

Q: When wouldn’t this approach work? What sort of things would you definitely not use this approach for?

Compliance training needs more ‘control’ than a semi-structured community-based social learning approach provides. Hands-on novice level job skills would better be suited to on the job training supported by performance support resources such as job aids and checklists. Beyond these two instances knowledge sharing and collaboration supported by networks and communities offer significant advantages over ‘training’.

Refer to previous answers regarding access to computers or mobile devices, plus basic familiarity with the tools used. This familiarity can be developed via preliminary learning / support activities before commencing the full WCL program.

Q: What are the next steps for this program?

There are several things we are now doing with this program to reuse and adapt it:

Curating key content for self-directed use by both people who have completed WCL and need refresher or performance support, or for independent use across the business.

Updating the social guided learning version of the program to support the launch of additional, targeted communities after our peak Christmas season.

Adding preliminary components to support people to develop familiarity and confidence with mobile and online technology as a pre-requisite to the WCL program.

In September 2014 we decided to get strategic with social learning in Coca-Cola Amatil’s Supply Chain and establish a Community of Practice for our Maintenance and Engineering team members across Australia and New Zealand. Helen Blunden of Activate Learning was engaged to help with this initiative. Helen and I are Working Out Loud about the development of this Community.

This post provides links to all our posts which collectively form a case study that we’ve developed as we worked. I’ve arranged them in a logical sequence for you to read if you wanted to follow the case study in rough order in which things happened (although there is a lot iteration). I’ll keep adding to it as we post more on this case.

1. Context – Michelle’s post about the background to the decision to get strategic with social learning and establish the Community of Practice

3. Work, Connect and Learn Program – Helen’s post about the guided social learning program we decided to develop to help community members learn skills and behaviours required to participate in online community activities

To support the launch of Coca-Cola Amatil’s Maintenance and Engineering Community of Practice we’ve built an online Community Hub in SharePoint 2013. I invite you to take a video tour of this Hub. As the tour is 15 minutes I have also provided a brief written description of the spaces set up on the Hub for Community members to connect, share and collaborate. (Note – I’ve recorded this video using Microsoft Lync.)

Key Hub Features

The Hub sits on our Maintenance Engineering SharePoint site, and is basically a dashboard with links to a range of spaces and resources on both SharePoint and the internet. In the video I walk through the spaces we’ve set up on SharePoint for Community members to interact online, connecting, sharing, solving problems and improving practices together. All of these spaces are accessible from any mobile device or computer using an organisational login. The mobile access is particularly important for maintenance tradespeople who spend most of their time in the production environment, away from desks.

The CCA Links on the hub are:

Discussion Forum – standard discussion board with ability to create new discussions, reply and like. The board can be sorted and filtered in a number of ways, and search is available on the site which will include discussions in results. A useful function I don’t discuss in the video is that an individual can quickly set up an alert to receive notifications of changes on the discussion forum via email (immediately, daily or weekly). This is helpful to stimulate those who aren’t working on SharePoint regularly to participate in forum activity.

Shared Notebook – a Microsoft OneNote notebook set up on the Maintenance and Engineering site. OneNote is a very easy to use, flexible collaborative tool. We have set up a section for use during the Work Connect and Learn program, and there is currently another section being used for Maintenance Managers meetings. We expect to see use of OneNote increase as Community members become familiar with it.

Contact Directory – a directory with expandable sections containing SharePoint profile key data. A person can be added to multiple sections reflecting the different groups to which they belong (e.g. Maintenance Managers, members of a physical site team, system Key Users). From each person’s directory entry you see whether they are online, start a Lync IM chat or call, create an email, access their contact details, or open their SharePoint personal page.

Example of Contact Directory popup with interfaces to Lync and SharePoint personal page

Supply Chain Knowledge Bites – a separate SharePoint site where anyone can share a short ‘bite’ of knowledge or ‘how to’ information. Documents and multi-media files can be included in a Bite, along with links to internet resources. People are often unsure about where or how to share their expertise, so we’ve set up this space to provide a common way of sharing and accessing documented know-how. The second half of the video explores Knowledge Bites in more detail.

Community members are learning how to use these spaces along with other collaborative tools (notably Microsoft Lync) through our Work Connect and Learn program. Program activities are being conducted in these normal working spaces so that people get used to using these spaces during the program, and continue to use them afterwards.

How the Hub was Built

Work on the hub commenced with a PowerPoint prototype which a colleague, Justine Jardine, developed with me in just one working day at the request of a keen senior manager who wanted to champion the solution at an annual planning meeting. We were able to respond so quickly in part because we had seen a demonstration of a knowledge sharing space set up on SharePoint 2013 by a New Zealand engineering firm, Tonkin & Taylor, in a 702010 Forum webinar. We included additional spaces and resources in the prototype, all of which we modelled on existing internal SharePoint sites. So, our prototype was low risk as we had working examples of all functionality included.

While our internal IT department provisions SharePoint sites using a standard organisational template, they do not build any functionality on sites. They also do not allow custom development, which ended up precluding some of the prototype features as Tonkin & Taylor had done custom development. Further, we were unable to use SharePoint ‘Community features’ as IT is still trialling these.

So, I developed the Hub using standard SharePoint 2013 functionality. While I knew how to build a dashboard, almost everything else I had to learn how to construct. I searched the internet for information and ‘how to’ articles and videos, with Helen Blunden (who was developing Work, Connect and Learn) researching SharePoint 2013 features alongside me. There is a LOT of freely available information about how to set things up in SharePoint 2013. I also got tips from our SharePoint SME in IT (he had time for quick questions), and appreciated some discussion with contacts at Tonkin & Taylor about their Knowledge Shots solution. Of course, the other way I learned was to experiment – to build things and see what they looked like, then adjust.

Several members of our internal Capability Community tested and reviewed the build as Hub components were developed. Often their excellent suggestions could not be implemented with standard SharePoint 2013 functionality, but did push me to figure out different ways to do things as we continued iterative development. The experience of building this Hub has made me more resourceful as a self-directed learner, and more likely to figure things out for myself than wonder why IT hadn’t “trained me” on using SharePoint.

Updates

At some point I’ll post an update about how Community members responded to the Hub and what adjustments or additional features we introduce. If you have any suggestions or feedback please leave a reply.